October 2008 posts

Friday, October 31, 2008

The finest radio drama of the 1930’s was The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a show featuring the acclaimed New York drama company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman. In its brief run, it featured an impressive array of talents, including Agnes Moorehead, Bernard Herrmann, and George Coulouris. The show is famous for its notorious War of the Worlds broadcast, but the other shows in the series are relatively unknown. This site has many of the surviving shows, and will eventually have all of them.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

In the Paris of the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway often donned boxing gloves and duked it out with random opponents in a makeshift ring. After a time, a small man volunteered to be Hemingway’s corner man. After a few more bouts, Scott Fitzgerald pointed to the corner man, washing Ernest down with a sponge, and asked Hemingway, "Do you know who that is?"

"No," Hemingway replied.

"It’s Joan Miró."

In 1927 Miró was so destitute that he invited the surrealist Andre
Masson over for lunch and fed him radishes and bread. Miró was an
unlikely champion of surrealism, but he soon vowed to "take an axe to
Picasso’s guitar" and was dubbed "the sardine tree" by Andre Breton.
The short period of phrase-based art which Miró embarked upon forms the
beginning of "Joan Miró 1927-1937: Painting and Anti-Painting," opening
this weekend at the Museum of Modern Art...."Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927–1937," Nov. 2, 2008-Jan.
12, 2009, at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York,
N.Y. 10019.

The mystery novelist Tony Hillerman died Sunday, at 83. Below is a reminiscence by the Book Review’s Crime columnist, Marilyn Stasio, who also wrote his obituary for the Times.

Tony Hillerman was known for his generosity to other authors and the kindness he showed to young people who could be opinionated and just plain irritating. I ought to know, having been the recipient of his kindness when I was young, opinionated and irritating. We were both attending a conference in Key West on mystery writing when I stepped out of my hotel on Duval Street and found him standing against the wall with his hands in his pockets and his face turned up to the sun. That looked good to me, so I joined him. Faces warmed, we drifted into a conversation about Ernest Hemingway, whose novels, I pertly noted, were anathema to me because of their sexism.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Making screencasts (also known as “video tutorials”) is already easy, and becomes easier with better tools
and broadband proliferation. However, no tech is complete without a
human who dives in, does experiments, and discerns best practices from
the results.

Throughout American history, the desire for libraries has inspired cities, architects and robber barons to build, not just boxes for books, but secular temples to the worship of words. Here are America's 10 coolest, from old school Beaux-Arts beauties to the airy halls of contemporary architecture.

Google has reached an out-of-court-settlement with the Authors Guild
and the AAP involving two separate lawsuit brought by the organizations
against Google’s Library Search program that made scans of books from
libraries, including books under copyright. The settlement includes a
$125 million payment by Google plus the establishment of a new
licensing system. Word of the possible settlement began leaking
just before Frankfurt, though no sides confirmed a deal was in place.
The AAP press release is below and more details will follow in PW Daily and the magazine.

The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and Google today announced a groundbreaking settlement agreement on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search. The agreement, reached after two years of negotiations, would resolve a class-action lawsuit brought by book authors and the Authors Guild, as well as a separate lawsuit filed by five large publishers as representatives of the AAP’s membership. The class action is subject to approval by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The agreement promises to benefit readers and researchers, and enhance
the ability of authors and publishers to distribute their content in
digital form, by significantly expanding online access to works through
Google Book Search, an ambitious effort to make millions of books
searchable via the Web. The agreement acknowledges the rights and
interests of copyright owners, provides an efficient means for them to
control how their intellectual property is accessed online and enables
them to receive compensation for online access to their works.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Independent:Books has an excellent article (with copious extracts), on Mark Crick’s parodical new title Satre’s Sink: The Great Writers’ Complete Book of DIY.
Written in the ‘voice’ of each writer who offers DIY advice, this
book has some absolute gems including Hanging Wallpaper with Ernest
Hemingway, Tiling a Bathroom with Dostoevsky and Repairing a Dripping
Tap with Marguerite Duras. Reading the extracts my favourite has to be
Hemingway’s wallpapering guide, which goes a little something like this:

Now he took two corners of the paper between thumb
and forefinger and folded almost two feet of the paper back on itself,
keeping paste against paste, pattern against pattern, until he had made
a concertina of the whole pasted length of paper. He kept the folds
loose so as not to crease the paper and he felt the slime like glue
slide between his fingers. He knew if he did not make the concertina,
the tension on the paper would be too great and the paper would break,
and he would be left holding only the two corners, like the ears of the
bull he had once seen killed when he was a young man.

Friday, October 24, 2008

Halloween usually brings a crimson tide of horror movies on DVD, and this year is no exception.

From Warner Home Video comes the American digital debut of Albert Lewin’s 1945 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s
“Picture of Dorian Gray” ($19.97). At once a slightly stuffy literary
adaptation in the high MGM manner and a down-and-dirty shocker that
resorts to gimmickry — sudden bursts of Technicolor in an otherwise
black-and-white film — the movie seems worthy of the schlockmeister
William Castle. (Though Castle would have given the trick a colorful
name — Gore-o-vision! — and posted nurses in the lobby to care for
potential fainting victims.)

This is a handsome, A-level production, most likely inspired by the success of the Victor Fleming-Spencer Tracy version of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” released by MGM in 1941. The luxurious period look of “Dorian Gray”
earned it an Academy Award nomination for art direction and an Oscar
for the veteran cinematographer Harry Stradling Sr. But its primary
asset is the young actor Hurd Hatfield, recruited by Lewin after a long
search to play Wilde’s decadent Victorian dandy, who retains his
youthful appearance while his hidden portrait festers with all the
visible signs of his evil ways.

Dreamer, Live in the Here and NowBy MANOHLA DARGIS, Published: October 24, 2008

To say that Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York”
is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is
such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well
pack it in right now. That at least would be an appropriate response to
a film about failure, about the struggle to make your mark in a world
filled with people who are more gifted, beautiful, glamorous and
desirable than the rest of us — we who are crippled by narcissistic
inadequacy, yes, of course, but also by real horror, by zits, flab and
the cancer that we know (we know!) is eating away at us and leaving us
no choice but to lie down and die.

7 Best Nonpolitical Jobs for Political JunkiesIf you want to sate your political appetite with a full-time job, here are some cool ideasBy Liz Wolgemuth,
Posted October 23, 2008

Ah, election season. There's nothing like a good battle between the Democrats and the Republicans (and Ralph Nader and Ron Paul) to whet the appetite of a political junkie. But if you're looking for something less temporal—the kind of work that will let you feed your addiction year-round—you don't have to become a legislator. Consider one of these (mostly) nonpolitical jobs where you may find a way to keep the spirit of the election alive every day.

Librarian: Not just any librarian—a special librarian. Special librarians work for companies, government agencies, nonprofits, universities, or museums, rather than for the general public. There are plenty of opportunities for people to focus on specialties. Janice Lachance, chief executive of the Special Libraries Association, says "it's absolutely a perfect fit" for people who are politically inclined, as leaders at nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, or government agencies rely on well-sourced, "top level information." Librarians can follow specific passions for policy or politics into jobs at places like AARP, which employs 13 association members. Most have a master's in library or information science, but the jobs pay: A 2008 association survey found the average salary of its members was $71,812.

* New popular library to be "inserted" in research library* $250M project will move ahead despite downturn* Architect known for blending old and new

The New York Public Library (NYPL) has picked British architect Norman Foster,
known for his firm’s work on the world’s largest airport terminal at
Beijing and the Great Court at London’s British Museum, to transform
the iconic 1911 building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street from a
research library into a hybrid that will be the world’s largest
comprehensive library open to the public.

Circulating collections, including those moved from the
Mid-Manhattan Branch across the street, will be placed in new spaces
currently occupied in part by the general research collection, which
will be moved into high-density shelving beneath adjacent Bryant Park.
The renovation is part of a $1 billion plan aimed to transform NYPL. The renovation itself would cost some $250 billion; library officials told the New York Times that, with the economic downturn, parts of the project could be delayed but they were confident it would move forward.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

North Carolina's New BluesIn Insecure Times, a State Once Firmly Republican Now Wobbles
By Kevin Merida, Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, October 22, 2008; Page A01

CHARLOTTE - The Queen City Motel sits barely noticed on this city's West Side, just
seven minutes from the wobbly banks and new construction projects
commanding the downtown skyline. At the Queen City, you find people who
are living by day and by week, watching economic calamity from the
outer edge of misery.

Some have no cars, no cellphones, no steady work,
no health plan and not enough food to fill a small fridge in a
$160-a-week room. But in this political season of surprise and
possibility, the presidential campaign has found an audience here even
among the disheartened.